All writing has a voice. Be it the dry, cynical wit of Jane Austen or the elaborate, highly academic voice of Charles Dickens, any good piece of writing has a character beyond simply the words on the page. In the case of your corporate blog, your writing voice is the most powerful tool that you can leverage to gain and retain a captive audience. As such, it is important to make a very clear decision on what your blog voice will be. We’ve provided a guide with the top four considerations in determining how to develop an appropriate and engaging blog voice.
Know Your Audience
It’s hard to know what your readers want without knowing who your readers are. Most of the time, your ideal reader is someone who will be directly purchasing your products or services. In this case, simply tap into the research that you have developed for all of your other marketing campaigns in forming your blog voice. If you know that your clients tend to be young, outgoing individuals, then your blog should tend to be lighthearted and energetic. If your clients tend to be highly focused professionals, say, engineers, then your blog should be straightforward and highly detailed.
A useful exercise can be to develop a typical “persona” for your targeted clients. Assign a series of traits to this imaginary person: age, gender, position, leisure activities, etc. The more thorough and well-researched the better. Then, imagine you are having a conversation with this person whenever you are writing your blogs. The way that you talk to your mother is almost certainly different from the way you talk to your friends, and this comes naturally. A simulated conversation with your target persona can recreate the natural flow and voice in writing.
Try New Things with Your Blog Voice
It’s said Thomas Edison invented the light bulb over 10,000 times before he got it right. Try tweaking different aspects of your blog and track what your results are. Like any good researcher, be sure to control your experiments by only changing one aspect of the blog voice at a time. If you tend to publish mostly long paragraphs, maybe publish a blog that is a “best-of” list. If you find that your viewership really likes your photographic content, maybe it’s time to try out a video blog! Experimenting with a blog can make marketers nervous. If you’re concerned about a new approach, you may choose to involve more people in the blog writing process, and maybe even ask members outside of the marketing team. To truly leverage your blog fully, you must avoid your fear of bad publicity and take a couple of (small) chances.
Don’t Be Afraid to Use (Relevant) Jargon
This is where it comes in handy to really know your audience. You can gain miles with your readership simply by speaking the same language that they do as part of your blog voice. To use an example cited previously, if your target audience is engineers, then you can feel comfortable referring to complex mathematical theories. If the target market is financial services professionals, do not hesitate to present your value propositions in terms of annual returns. Speaking the language (read: jargon) of your audience will do nothing but endear them to your blog. Moreover, speaking in layman’s terms may leave them with the impression that the writer of your blog is inexperienced or unversed in their fields or interests. As such, you might even discourage an active group of followers by trying to keep your appeal broader than it needs to be.
Keep Up-to-Date
Timeliness is an integral aspect of writing a successful blog. While you may think of the timeliness of blog content often, you may not pay attention to trends in the world of blog voices. Make no mistake: the internet is a constantly shifting landscape. Blogs today are far less intimate than they once were. The trend has shifted toward providing value to the reader, as opposed to divulging the thoughts, interests, and musings of the author. This has made blogs an excellent place for a company to connect with its customers and clients in a genuine fashion. However, the standard “netiquette” of blogs can shift just as quickly and just as drastically. Therefore, it’s important that as the marketer in charge of a corporate blog, you ensure that you are up-to-date on what other bloggers, both corporate and private, are doing.
What do you do to shape your blog voice? Leave us a comment in the section below!
